I'm looking for your expectations here - to see if I need to recalibrate mine.

I've been experiencing a problem on my virtually hosted site for the last 12 hours. The /var partition is full. It filled Friday, and when I called for support, one of their techs deleted a log file or two and freed up space. It prompty filled again Saturday.

This means mySQL is effectively down, as are all the services that use it on that server. A good portion of my site is currently unusable. I cannot do anything to fix this. I'm ready to leave this Hosting company. I've only been with them for 2 weeks! Am I jumping the gun? Let me continue.

The host support staff is unavailable. They have an 800 number, however it's not staffed 7x24. There are no other contact numbers. They claim that their email helpdesk system is staffed 7x24, however I've received no reply to my multiple requests for assistance. Since the actual problem is trivial to resolve - empty out log files that have 6-8 weeks of data in them - I'm very frustrated at this time.

What are your expectations in this case? My plan costs me $24.95 a month. It comes with a 99.9% uptime guarantee that's not really spelled out anywhere, and since the server itself is running, I suspect they will consider they have met their 99.9% requirements for uptime...

Are my expectations too high here? I really thought I would not need a company with emergency pager support if they indeed had 7x24 email support. Apparently they are not available 7x24 after all. I suppose I should have gone with someone who had some form of escallation on their site.

I paid for a year in advance, and have again screwed myself. I'm over the 30 day unconditional money back guarantee, moved my 6 year old site to this host from another bad host, and pissed off a good number of my users in the process - as things were mostly unavailable while the DNS changes trickled down.

I'm ready to change again after only being live for 2 weeks with this host. Am I jumping ship too soon?

Any advise? Comments?

Thanks for your comments.

Well, you don't just want to bail out every time there is a problem (if you did that, you'd be switching hosts every month), but in this case, if support isn't responding in a timely matter, let alone taking care of the problem, you might want to try another host.

They should have 24/7 tech support with people who can make things happen (not just take support tickets for someone later).

With that said, depending on what needs to be done, sometimes unfortunately it does take some time to fix things.

I agree with Chicken that if you jumped ship every time there was a hic-up you'd be changing very often. NTL, you have to decide if this is the last straw. If all else was good then maybe this is just that .1% of the time when stuff happens.

Perhaps I'm just a bit jumpy this time, but I can assure you my history is not one of ship jumping. I even bought 12 months of service in advance because I was confident in the research I had done that this was going to be a one-time move; the next 5 years and next generation of my web services would be at the new hosting company.

I brought my site up in late Fall of 1995. Many people didn't even know what the Web was in 1995, and there were a significant number of problems with my initial host. I had been online with the same company through a number of company acquisitions since then. As they grew, support degraded, and I finally could not handle the poor support any longer, and changed last month.

I'm not sure I changed to the right company. It's now been 14 hours with a dead site and no response from Liquidweb at all. I actually have two sites on the same server (different accounts, both at $25/month) and both are dead. It looks like there are about 200 clients on this box (the /home directory listing), and anyone who uses anything in /var is dead as well.

It really sucks, and yes, I'm :angry:.

Ask your host to symbolically link the MySQL data directory from the main /home partition. That way all the data does not fill up the usually smaller /var partition. It will save them (and you) some disk space problems down the road (and right now).;)

- John C.

Originally posted by JohnCrowley
Ask your host to symbolically link the MySQL data directory from the main /home partition. That way all the data does not fill up the usually smaller /var partition. It will save them (and you) some disk space problems down the road (and right now).;)

- John C.

So the drill would be:

1) Stop the mySQL database engine
2) Move the /var/lib/mysql directory over to say /home/lib/mysql
3) Create the symbolic link from /var/lib/mysql to /home/lib/mysql
4) Restart mySQL

Yes? No? Any issues with this?

I'm pretty sure there have been some negative reports on LiquidWeb recently, but the forum search engine can't search old discussions until the new version of the forum software is re-indexed. Try a search in another day or two.

If you have telnet access, log in and tar your logs. They are a common reason for the var partition filling.

Originally posted by Duster
If you have telnet access, log in and tar your logs. They are a common reason for the var partition filling.

I don't have write access to the logs or I would. I feel like my hands are tied. :bawling:

Per moving the MySQL data directory, all that needs to be moved is:
/var/lib/mysql/data to /home/mysql/data
then link it:
ln -s /home/mysql/data /var/lib/mysql/data
That way the mysql databases are stored off the /var partition. I "hope" your host will understand how to do this and that it will free up the needed space to prevent databases from operating correctly.

- John C.